We Need a Better NAFTA

The new NAFTA is another corporate handout. It won't stem the outsourcing of good jobs or protect the rights of working people. Tell Congress the new NAFTA isn't good enough and to refuse to vote on it.

The tension between work and time off has always been a concern of the American labor movement. Work may be one of our core values, but it has a purpose, which is to allow us to live good lives, provide for ourselves and our families and, yes, to earn some time off to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Today, work and time off are badly out of balance, and Labor Day is a case in point.

Working people are taking fewer vacation days and working more. That's the top finding in a new national survey, conducted by polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the AFL-CIO in collaboration with the Economic Policy Institute and the Labor Project for Working Families. In the survey, the majority of America's working people credit labor unions for many of the benefits they receive.

In January, I was invited to serve on President Donald Trump’s manufacturing council, along with my boss, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. At the time, I was deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO (the largest federation of trade unions in America) and a spokesperson for the organization on trade, manufacturing, and economic policy. President Trumka and I agreed to serve because we believed — and still do — that working people should have a voice in crucial government decisions affecting their jobs, their lives, and their families.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump stood in the lobby of his tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and again made excuses for bigotry and terrorism, effectively repudiating the remarks his staff wrote a day earlier in response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va.

AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, published a new column on Huffington Post. He writes how Hillary roots for working people and why working people are championing her in tonight's presidential debate.

“Women are more activist than men,” said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, “and understand that Clinton supports collective bargaining, raising the minimum wage and paid time off for illness and family care.” This year the AFL-CIO is targeting women as an individual voting group for the first time in a presidential race. Earlier this month 15,000 women, three times as many as expected, joined a conference call Shuler led to discuss strategies for convincing coworkers and relatives to vote for Clinton.